I’m working on the third draft of my thriller, Tell On You.  A couple of my reviewers have weighed in with their feedback and suggestions (the rest of you, and you know who you are, please hop to it!).  Mostly, I find revising easier than writing the first draft.  At least I have something there to work with and it’s gratifying to know I’m improving the novel as I chug along.

But still, receiving constructive feedback makes me feel like a bottle of salad dressing being shaken.  I know it will come out better that way, but it’s unsettling. I’ve had practice taking feedback, thanks to five years in a great critique group.  Yet much as I hate to admit it, my initial gut reaction to criticism and suggestions is usually a bit of resistance.  Sometimes more than a bit.  I have thoughts like:

 It’ll ruin my story/protagonist/summer, etc. if I do that.

 That’s going to be way too much work.

 What does that reviewer know, anyway?

Maybe most, or all, writers tend to react that way.  We’re enamored of what we’ve written.  We don’t want to kill our darlings.

But, after the initial NOOO!! I let the critique and suggestions marinate in my head for a while.  (You can use salad dressing as a marinade, right?  So I’m not really mixing metaphors here.)  At this stage, I’m pondering, trying on the ideas, considering where they might take me.  I’ve often found that the suggestions I resist the most at first prove the most fruitful when I finally take them to heart.  And usually the surgery required to integrate them into my manuscript isn’t as invasive and painful as I’d feared.

So I’m halfway through my third draft now, giving my protagonist some touch-ups so readers won’t dislike him too much.  And I like where this rewrite is going!  Last week, my guest blogger Scott Bell shared some excellent lessons he’d learned about rewriting.  I’d love to hear from fellow writers about your own struggles and triumphs as you revise.

How many times have you thought, Man, that’s easy.  Hold my beer while I try this…? 

I remember thinking, at 16-years old, “I can rebuild that carburetor.  How hard can it be?”  Or there was the time I said to my wife, “We don’t need to spend money on a driving school; we can teach the kids to drive ourselves.”  And I’ll always remember, “Remodel the kitchen?  Sure!  No problem!” 

Skinned knuckles, hurt feelings, and a lot of cursing later, I always discovered my optimism was sadly misplaced. 

But somehow, when it came to writing, the same bit of nonsense dribbled through my mind, “I can write a novel.  How hard can it be?”

Flashback to 2010 

A fresh Word document is open.  The little blinky cursor line (I call it a curse line today) is mocking me.  I want to write a story.  A novel.  With characters and whatnot.  Words.  Sentences.  Explosions, sex, violence.  

Okay.  Go ahead.  Start.

“Chapter One” I type.  Good.  What next?  I indent the words.  Then I center them.  Then I change it to read “Chapter 1.”  I hit enter, enter.  Tab.  

Ready for the first paragraph.

So I think, “What do I want my story to be about?” 

Without going into a painful recounting of that whole mess, let’s jump forward a little to the point where the first draft is complete, which is when I learn how truly bad it sucked.  I was fortunate enough to fall into a critique community chock full of people who ripped my writing to 

It was at this point, I learned “The Rules.”

The Rules

Thou shalt not commit adverbary.  It was revealed unto me that adverbs are tools of the devil and their usage would condemn me to everlasting hell.  Based on that advice, I dutifully (see what I did there?) purged my work of anything ending in LY.  Period.  If it modified a verb, 

Thou shalt not write in passive voice.  The rule itself, I later learned, is bogus.  Passive voice doesn’t mean what they think it means.  What they mean to say is: Don’t use weak verbs to convey meaning.  Was is the biggest offender, and too much wassing is a mortal sin.  So I went forth and rid my manuscript of all the “was” verbs I could, rewriting entire paragraphs in order to 

Thou shalt not tell, thou shalt show.  This one was trickier.  Instead of saying: Johnny felt sick to his stomach, one should say something like: Queasiness made Johnny dizzy.  I was supposed to show the action/result rather than tell the reader what happened.  Sometimes a simple show can result in a two-dozen word rewrite.  But them’s the rules, chump. 

Thou shalt not infodump backstory.  In my first weak attempts at novel writing, I created all these cool characters and I wanted to share them with everyone.  So I told readers all about the character’s history, starting from when dey wuz babies and carrying on trew dey adultness.  That earned me the scarlet letter of N for novice, newbie, nincompoop.

Here’s another classic I’ve finally gotten around to reading.  The first German book to top the New York Times bestseller list, The Reader is both disturbing and inspiring.  The protagonist, Michael, (the titular reader) is seduced as a teen by Hanna, a woman over twice his age, who awakens him sexually and spoils him for anyone else.  She disappears only to resurface as a defendant in a Nazi war crimes trial he is observing as a law student.  He struggles with his feelings about who she is, what she may or may not have done and his own possible moral obligation to reveal a truth about her that he alone seems to know.

I greatly enjoyed this small gem of a book.  It abounds in paradox.  The story is simple, yet laden with complexities.  Michael is of the generation whose parents were adults in the Third Reich, bequeathing his cohort a horrifying burden of shame and outrage.  Add to that the confusion of a precocious sexual relationship and we have a narrator whose innocence has truly been stolen.  Both Hanna and Michael wage lonely struggles to make right out of terrible wrongs.  It is left to the reader (apt, that) to determine how well they succeed.  This is a haunting story.